Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowThe Project For The New American Century: Part Two
In the wake of unimaginable disaster, the supporters of the PNAC saw their chance to transform their theories into policy. At least, that's how critics often portray the group -- why? In the second part of this two-part series, Ben and Matt dive deep into the story of the short-lived think tank, from the global aftermath of the attacks on September 11th to the official end of the PNAC.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, Welcome back to the show. Our colleague Noel continues to do his duty.
Doody, you're Matt. They called me Ben. We're joined again with our guest superproducer, Max white Pants Williams.
Most importantly, you are you.
You are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know a rare two parter because there are many, many, many, many many things that we have to get to Matt, as we're talking about off air.
Perhaps the most.
Important thing here, folks is please listen to our earlier episode, part one on Project for a New American Century, and Matt, what better way to start off than to give maybe a quick recap ends a shout out to some of the articles that we have been reading from the early two thousands, well from two thousand.
Oh yeah, let's start by giving you how about a description of the Project from the New American Century written by Thomas Donnelly, Donald Kagan, and Gary Schmidt, some of the founders of the organization. This is from Rebuilding America's Defenses, published in September two thousand.
Quote.
Established in the spring of nineteen ninety seven, the Project for the New American Century is a nonprofit educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. It's an initiative of the New Citizenship Project. I don't know what that is. I don't know what that is, but here's the major quote from that section. As the twentieth century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world's most preeminent power, having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge. Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievement of past decades. Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests. That's what this paper is about, answering those questions, and that is the Project for a New American Century. It's a think tank for people who are really all about defense and an ideological powerful America that kind of is the police force of the world.
Here are the facts, so brief recap. Back in back in the late nineties, the Project for a New American Century was started as a way to push this vision you're describing that out into the world and take it from the realm of academia and theory into actual on the ground policy. This was something that found a great deal of support, especially in conservative circles of American politics. It also came about as a culmination of fears and concerns that date back well before what we call the Cold War. There is a long narrative thread here, and as we mentioned at the close of part one, we are going to talk as objectively as possible about the events of September eleventh, two thousand and one terrorist attacks on the United States. The conventional explanation for US action after nine to eleven. We're going to spend a lot of time on the aftermath here. The conventional explanation goes something like this. After the Twin Towers are hit in New York. After the attack on DC, retaliation against al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan was seen as an immediate step, but only a first step in a staircase really a global war against terrorism. Now, the United States for some time has been fascinated with the concept of waging a war on ideas, a war on drugs, a war on poverty, very short lived, it didn't test well with the base. And then of course a war on terrorism. And you mentioned Matt earlier in part one, the idea of weapons of mass destruction, the infamous moment wherein Colin Powell testifies that there is yellow cake uranium controlled by the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. This also gets support from the United Kingdom. They co sign these statements.
And don't forget the aluminum tubes.
Oh, the aluminum to Yeah, you know what, the aluminum tubes everywhere and shout out to some great most def Dave Chappelle sketches about this as well. So the idea was that, yes, the base of America, the American public is incredibly freaked out. This is horrific. They want someone to fight. There needs to be justice done, a very valid, very reasonable reaction. And the PNAC says, this is our opportunity, this is what we were talking about. This is our stepping stone, it's our door into further action abroad in Iraq.
Well, because remember their aims all along have been to increase defense spending overall within the United States budget to make sure the United States is the most powerful weaponized country that can dominate every back ground they are met in right the land, the sea, the air, and even space. Is what they're advocating for at this time, right before and immediately following the.
Attacks, and by this time in the aftermath of the attacks, large principal characters in the PNAC are in positions of power to make those decisions to enact the theories that they have spent so much time ideating. A pod to this day, right now, you can look back at various statements that did not age well. The idea that invading Iraq was a natural response to the attacks, despite the fact that the hijackers were Saudi Arabian in origin, despite the fact that al Qaeda is not located in Iraq, and people are saying people were saying, you know, this theory this ad to zed that you're writing out in this narrative, it simply doesn't add up. And a lot of people who raise their voices at that time were excoriated for saying this, and to this day, more than two decades later, a lot of troubling questions remain. You know, was like critics say, the p and AC was waiting for their pearl. Harbor was waiting for that opportune moment, the right sequence of events to fall into place, just like some sort of grisly game of dominoes. And it even leads the more far out fringe you could call them questions in the crowd. It leads to more far out questions such as how far would these very powerful people go to remake the world in their vision. Here's where it gets crazy, Matt. You made a fantastic point off air a couple months back when we were talking about looking through our old YouTube videos and sometimes I forget we have quite a lot of them.
Oh yeah, no, yeah, let's go in and restate that here. So back in November last year, twenty twenty three, we noticed that our twenty fourteen videos, we made two major ones back in twenty fourteen on our YouTube channel about the September eleven attacks. One was called thirteen burning Questions about nine to eleven. That's basically ben stating big questions that we still have about the attacks, right, and it's just kind of stating them and then setting up our next video saying we're going to spend a whole video on World Trade Center building seven and the collapse of that building, as it is the third building that collapsed there in New York City on that day or I guess like after the initial attacks. So we made another video titled what Happened to seven World Trade Center, and we realized you could not type into Google those titles in quotations, which is one of the most surefire ways to find a video or any piece of content. Put quotation marks around the exact title and you can generally find something. It could not find our videos, so we searched YouTube. Those videos could not be found. Then we searched within our own YouTube channel because there's a function there on YouTube to search for that, and they could not be found. And we realized you had to browse like by date basically to find them, as they were still live. They were still there, still viewable. You just wouldn't be able to find them unless you, I guess navigated to them directly. We thought that was pretty weird because together both videos had over three hundred and thirty thousand views, which meant, you know, they're not viral, but they're well viewed videos. It didn't make sense to us, and actually, see if you go on if you go on those videos. You look at the comments, the newest comments from about starting about seven or six years six or seven years ago, it's all about Hey, it seems like these nine to eleven videos are getting scrubbed from the internet. Can't really find them anymore.
Which is which is strange because we make no outrageous claims in those videos we take we take a lot of care to be as as objective as possible in anything, but especially with that we also, for the record, folks, we do not include any hate speech, no no vilification of demographics, no calls for violence, none of the usual red flags for YouTube. Also, by the way, I think this is this is around the same time as a little Inside Baseball. This is around the same time you and I had to take like a YouTube academy course about the right way to do videos.
When we published them in twenty fourteen.
Yeah, and we were going by the book very much. So, if anything, the criticism you could give the two of us on that is that we were maybe overly cautious, maybe I don't know, but we did a good faith effort and still even now I would argue this is indicative of us stunning and strange disconnect regarding the events of nine to eleven and its aftermath, Questioning the official narrative was portrayed as severely across the board on American conflicting reports, rationale statements that came from US bodies and US public officials were often dismissed as fog of war, you know, don't look at the left hand, watch what the right hand's doing. Or if those statements indeed tradicted one another in a narrative when they came into conflict, then they were dismissed and you had just sort of choose one, and now this person misspoke or they were misinformed. History was being edited in real time, and sometimes those claims came into conflict with facts, you know, like we mentioned the yellow cake uranium, the claims of weapons of mass destruction as evidenced by aluminum tubes, all of which, by the way, were later disproven there were not WMDs, at least not the kind that were described to the American public. And then sweep, sweep, sweep, right under the rug.
It goes well, yeah, it goes back to something you said, Ben. It really depends on how far you were willing to take. Some very on the surface objective strange coincidences, and how closely you're willing to knit those together to form a larger narrative, right, And how dark is that narrative that you're willing to create, right, Because you can go through and look at the Project for the New American Centuries publications is specifically when they're referencing people who are in power at the time they initially gain power, and then what the Project for the New American Century wants to see happen within the White House and the Defense Department. You can look this one up right now if you want to. We won't read the whole thing, but it's titled Calculating the Rumsfeld Effect. It was written by Robert Kagan, who was one of the one of the big writers they're at PNAC writing for the Washington Post. He would often write opinion pieces that would be kind of circulated by the PNAC and written by somebody who's a member, you know, of high standing. But it's written ultimately for the Washington Post about specifically about how what effect Donald Drumsfeld is going to have on the overall outlook of defense spending and strategy because of his new position, as well as Paul Wolfowitz, they this person. Robert Kagan refers to both of them as missile defense hawks and then calls out Colin Powell for being a skeptic of a lot of the strategies that the PNAC and Robert Kagan want to see in place. They you know, and they even call out Dick Cheney, and you call it like, well, how much you know, basically how much power will Dick Cheney actually be wielding within his position at the White House, Which is like stuff that to me, they're writing about this stuff that feels like when we look back at the way we've created narratives about out these moments in the White House, right the movie Vice starring Christian Bale, created by Adam McKay, and thinking about Dick Cheney as more of a someone in power rather, you know, rather than vice president, probably acting more as president at times at least, And how excited this group was that that group of people was in there controlling things. It just it makes you wonder what else was happening, because we don't see it all written out right in these PNAC publications, but it does almost it's almost like it tells a story that has a bunch of redacted pieces. Does that makes sense? So it feels like a conspiracy theory.
It does. Yeah, And I think you hit on it, Matt. There's a narrative here. And the war is it's two wars again, right. Part of the war is this physical activity abroad, and another part of the war is for the heart's minds and opinions of the American public to support some drastic changes and escalations in foreign policy.
And also, you know.
The thread of argument from the p and AC cohort at this time is very much like a once that TV ad guy Billy mays like an act now imperative.
Right now is not the time.
To dither and ask all these what if since if thens. Now is the time to solve the problem. We America are in a crisis moment and therefore must act as quickly as possible. And anything that holds up that train, anything that pumps the breaks on, that is anathema. It is unclean, and it is against the larger mission of justice.
Oh.
In May two thousand and one, there's another memo tho was written called the two War Standard, that is specifically talking about Donald Rumsfeld going to the White House to present a brand new blueprint directly to the President of the United States of how the US military should move forward, like Donald Rumsfeld, one of the PNAC guys that they're looking at basically telling the not telling, let's say, strongly pitching that this is the way things should go. And the whole point of that of that new blueprint is that the United States has to have a number of like a number of military personnel at various places, of various ranks, to be able to fight two simultaneous wars on two different battlefields, like two fronts basically and be victorious handedly in both. And think about what happened that's May two thousand and one, and then what a year later, a year and a half later. Okay, let's say two years later, we are simultaneously fighting two major wars on two different fronts.
And keep in mind, folks, for the p ANDAC at this juncture, the vibe is that they're making up for lost time. Right, Military expenditure as a percentage has is not where they want it to be.
Right.
Neither, by the way, is military enrollment or recruitment. This all changes on September eleventh. Military recruitment spikes, and indeed many people tuning in tonight joined up as a result of the events of September eleventh.
This was.
That watershed moment, that Pearl Harbor moment. The p and AC both yearned for and appeared to some to predict at attack on American soil, catalyzing, unifying, promoting a strong reaction, an aversion to serious and difficult questions, and there was this huge increase. Like you said, in military expenses, P and AC proposals are adopted, mandated, put into action at an extraordinarily swift rate.
Okay, with that, we're going to take a quick break. Here, a word from our sponsor. Then we'll be right back, and we are back. Let's go back to the GDP stuff we talked about in part one. Nineteen ninety nine, the United States spent two hundred and sixty billion dollars on defense. Let's jump to twenty ten, So this is after we invade Afghanistan, we have invaded Iraq, we have fight a bunch of other little minor proxy wars in parts of the Middle East. In twenty ten, the United States is spending now four point five percent of GDP on defense, and that equals to six hundred and seventy seven billion dollars a year.
I guess it's almost imaginary money, it.
Is, but it you know, it's like a two and a half x kind of thing where it's like, it's just a crazy amount of money. It goes from two point seven percent to four point five percent in like ten years, and it's exactly what they wanted. Yeah, the they called for three point eight by the way, they called for three point eight percent GDP spending on defense and they got four point five.
Right, right.
The wins were favorable policy wise, and you know, the disturbing thing about it is that very quickly the true origin of the attack became somewhat academic. The event is what you needed. It's sort of like how how in Venezuela's current regime, the invasion of Guiana, if it occurs, does not have to be successful. The event simply needs to exist such that it can solidify the views of the public and tamp down on the opposition.
Yeah, the views of the public, both within the United States or the country that's going to be the aggressor, but also in the international community. Because you need that thing. That Bush ended up getting the coalition of the willing right of all the other countries that are part of the UN, that are part of NATO that join in and say, oh, yeah, you guys were wronged. We're going to support you too.
Yes, yeah, agreed.
And from this event then sprang the justification for war abroad and wars abroad, and an almost incalculable flow of military funding and a lot of money fell through the cracks. By the way, shout out to that palette of cash that just disappeared in the Middle East, and coldly, but it's a fantastic time to be part of the military industrial congressional complex that Eisenhower warned the public about so very long ago. Also in the speech he says military industrial complex, but in his original draft, as we pointed out before, he had the phrase military industrial congressional complex, and that last word got cut out.
Well, and let's not forget things like the Patriot Act that were passed, solidifying of power in very different ways than the United States was used to. Right about what US military forces can do, what intelligence forces can do, where they can act, how they can act, what the US civilians are going to be subjected to.
Your rights, to your rights to privacy, or your lack thereof expansion of a surveillance state that continues today.
And we're in that moment of a tremendous fear anger. Right, like all of these things that the general population is feeling because of these horrendous, horrifying attacks, something like the Patriot Act comes along and it feels like, oh, someone, they're trying to protect us, and we are. You know, this is not only about protecting us, this is about getting justice, so we must go forward. I support that thing, of course I do. If I didn't, i'd be an American.
Right, Yeah, pure pressure writ large Macrocosmis Shale. Well, it's also I think it's also very important for us to say that a lot of these policymakers, from their perspective, they are acting in good faith. There's not like a Monty Burn's fingers steepling going yes, yes, well ruin stuff.
There are a couple and they're the attorneys who are going through looking at the enhanced interrogation techniques. I think those guys are steepling, going, well, men can slap their legs.
As hard as we can. Oh yeah, well was it?
I stand eight hours a day anyway. But that's that's also again that that can be attributed to mission creep and the insidious allure of the greater good argument rights as we I think, as we prove pretty well in our previous series on torture, torture doesn't work. It is incredibly clear that torture does not work. Now pulling it, we can foist any nomenclature we want on it. Call it enhanced interrogation, you know, call it non consensual interview techniques. It doesn't matter. The reality is, despite what various fictional shows show us, the ticking time bomb situation is relatively rare, and the people who are conducting these activities also don't see themselves as.
The bad guys.
It is a greater good argument. And it's also you know, logically, it is incredibly difficult to defend yourself by saying I stopped something from happening, you know what I mean. Like, if you're the person who is a minute late for the train and you have a strong feeling that the train will crash, and the train doesn't crash, then you just had a weird vibe. You know, it's tough to prove that you saved lives with this. So it's just to be very fair. Again, these are not necessarily villainous people. But there is an argument that perhaps they've been I don't want to say brainwashed, but perhaps they are disincentivized from asking some of the questions that should have been asked.
Well, here's where it gets dangerous, I think, because you can convince yourself that all of those guys are villains if you allow yourself to go all the way and say, well, the September eleventh attacks were like purposefully done, or you know, it was a false flag, or it was allowed to happen, and all those other things. That stuff is, at least to my knowledge and all of the research we have done, I have not seen any kind of smoking guns that say any of that stuff is true.
I have.
What I have seen is that that instance, that moment, those attacks became used a very useful thing for the folks at the PNAC and the what you would just what you would describe as warhawks, the people who want the war machine to grow larger, that want the United States to be the ideological hedgemon. It was a useful thing. Unfortunately.
Yeah, I'm with you on the smoking gun stuff, Matt. The I'm also in agreement one hundred percent with the opportunism. Opportunism there can be proven. I mean, look, the pieces for the p ANDAC goals were, as we establish in Part one, they're all over the place, numerous statements, memos, documents, you name it. For example, before the PNAC blueprint emerged, and again it's all pre nine to eleven. There was an earlier document co authored by Wolfowitz that said you could kind of say he said the quiet part out loud, but they weren't being quiet. They were being very forthright. Honestly, this paper that wolf Woods Rights says in part quote, the US must discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or its key even aspiring to a larger regional or global rule. The idea is that if you allow right, today's regional power may become tomorrow's global super opponent.
Reminds me of Libya.
Yeah, yeah, and I mean Libya and Gaddafi got put down, as as as the facts would later prove. Gaddafi was taken down due to French concerns about currency control, but that didn't come out in a lot of the speeches at the time.
Dude, we didn't even mention. I'm looking at this ABC News article just mentioning this stuff. And there there are other people involved here that we didn't even mention in part one. There are a time Richard Armitage, who was the Secretary of State for a while, John Bolton, who has played a large role not not wait, hold on, not Michael Bolton. Not Michael Bolton, John Moulton, the mustache. Yes, Oh who was the other person?
Uh?
Somebody? Richard Pearl another person who's been mentioned a whole bunch. It's just I'm getting off track, man. In my mind is reeling on a lot of these things, because it does feel like there are connections to a lot of the major topics we're hitting on, to all the other topics I want to talk about in here. It feels like a blueprint for somebody who wants to build a conspiracy board. And I think that's maybe why I use that word dangerous, because it does feel like you could go down this rabbit hole and not be able to find your way out. I really do think you could get trapped here.
Oh yeah yeah.
And these papers again, what they show us, these earlier statements from principles in the p and AC, what they show us is not necessarily conspiracy to cause a thing to happen, but they show us a group of people who are primed to react in the wake of a horrible event and to move in step. The paper also goes on, this is the staircase thing we're talking about earlier. The paper also goes on to say, look, even if Saddam is popped and is off the scene, we're going to keep those bases in Saudi Arabia and quite middle because Iran may be the next regional threat. And then they kind of treat China like the final boss some weird video game, because that's what they end on often. And on the horizon, China the next USSR. Who knows, but a regional power one day is a global power the next.
And they're saying to shift all of like a bunch of our resources basically to the South China, see to areas in China or near China.
The Pacific theater. Yeah, absolutely, And we have to give a shout out as well to the numerous journalists, the so often ignored academics who rightly boldly asked some uncomfortable questions and we're in some cases we're very heavily punished for it, Like why did it seem that the President of the United States was left in the cold. Some of these events unfolded right whose sidelines?
The potus?
Another thing, why did the CIA and the FBI seem so cartoonishly siloed. We're talking about the big dogs of intelligence. These have some of the most brilliant people in the world work for these organizations. How come there were so many red flags that seem ignored in the lead up to the events of September eleventh. Is it simply you know, again, it's perspective. Do we as people with the benefit of retrospect, do we see things differently? I think I'm almost certain the answer is yes, right, because you know, if you look into stuff, and this is public knowledge, if you look into various ugly leads and reports of strange things in the US, and what you learn very quickly there's a lot of crazy stuff out there, and there are a lot of people reporting crazy stuff for any number of reasons. You have to cut through good noise, and it's tough to cut through that noise. Like okay, another one. All the way back to nineteen ninety six, there was squarely established intel that said there are serious plans, there are people talking about how to hit various targets in washing in DC using airplanes as weapons.
Yeah, ninety six.
Yeah, ninety six. And that's well after well, I don't know if that's before or after the Olympics bombing, right, that's after the Oklahoma City bombing with Timothy McVay nineteen ninety five. It does make me wonder, Ben, how much of that kind of stuff is the same thing that the PNAC is doing trying to figure out who the next big bad guy is going to be since the Soviets are no longer there, right, and people are square You can see it in American media as well. We're squarely looking at Middle East quote terrorists as like the next big bad guy, which is kind of weird, but it is what we're looking at. And there's actual intelligence showing that there are dangers from smaller groups, right, that's really what we're looking at, like potential plans from smaller groups that would carry out some kind of attack.
And these things. To be clear, these threats have to be taken seriously.
Right.
We're not attempting to paint any of the people we've mentioned as jumping at shadows, right, there are real consequences. They are aware of these consequences. A lot of thought goes into this. But then how about that National Intelligence Council report from nineteen ninety nine that reiterated the same stuff and in this case specifically named al Qaeda. How this get missed?
You know?
And then there's the other guy, Zacharias MUSSAUI. Some of us may remember in August of two thousand and one, he gets arrested because his flight instructor says, this guy has a quote suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airlines. Zacharias Moussawi, by the way, I often thought of as the twentieth of the hijackers. So why, like, how could how could something as plugged in as the US intelligence, economy, industry, right collective community? How could these things be missed?
Are we? I don't know?
That's what I wrestled with Matt because it's so easy to look back and say the signs were all there. But if you're in the moment and you're getting thousands and thousands of reports per day, per hour, you know, then how can you coalate and synthesize all of that? Why did the FBI turn down the warrant to search Masaui's computer.
I have no idea, And let's pause right there. Here a word from our sponsor, and we'll be right back. And we've returned. Well, let's talk about what you found in Newsweek and the Guardian and the BBC all reporting on stuff that was happening right around the September eleven attacks. What was this about fifteen of the hijackers got their visas in Saudi Arabia and we then invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Uh huh. Yeah.
That's a Guardian article from two thousand and three by Michael Meecher, definitely a journalist with strong opinions. The headline of the article is this war on terrorism is bogus, which struck a lot of people the wrong way, I think. But they point out some very solid things, right, like the accusation that since the late eighties, the CIA has been kind of off the books, illegally issuing visas to applicants from the Middle East, bringing them to the US for training, you know, like School of the America's type stuff, so that.
They like, is in guerrilla warfare kind of stuff.
Yeah, so that they could asymmetrical kind of tactics, so that they could participate in the conflicts in Afghanistan, and then after the Afghan War, this operation or this process seemed to continue apace. There's the Newsweek thing. I'm glad you're pointing that out. September fifteenth, two thousand and one, Newsweek reported that five of those hijackers in nine to eleven, we're trained at a secure US military installation in the nineties.
Well, I mean, what do you do with that information?
I know, right, what do you do?
You go?
Okay, So that's fishy as well. Why would that occur? Maybe they were trying to build assets for one thing, but then they did something else.
Mission creep man, it's real. I mean, maybe there's we talked about this too in the past.
Like the idea then is.
Pretty self apparent. Right, You train somebody for something. When that thing is done accomplished or when it fails, that training does not go away, you know what I mean. People don't get some kind of retrograde amnesia for this. There are other things too, you know, and these questions rightly haunt a lot of people. We have to be very careful again not to play too much red stream conspiracy board stuff with this, But why did it take so long to scramble fighter planes right in one of the most heavily populated parts of the country.
Why didn't they release any footage from any of the security cameras at the Pentagon. That still bugs the heck out of me. Somebody somewhere right now, release some high quality security camera footage from the Pentagon attack. Somebody do it, because the like seventeen frames or whatever they got released that is not good enough.
And it's certainly not the totality of the footage for sure. And also, again I keep going back to it, the US does have one of the absolute best intelligence apparatuses on the planet. They are deeply linked, sometimes not consensually, with pretty much every other intel opiration out there, you know what I mean, Like.
Look cell phone, so like come on, I.
Know, I know, I keep trying to get see the intern to play words with friends, But like, how did five eyes miss all of these things, these things that appear to be apparent red flax? These are valid questions. Uh, we gotta site also in that Guardian article, I know you saw this, Matt. We got to cite a banger of a quote former US Federal crimes prosecutor John Loftis wrote this. He said, the information provided by European intelligence services prior to nine to eleven was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence. Those are very heavy words. Those are words you have to be careful with, you know.
Wow.
And again that's just one guy saying that, right, but it is. It is someone who is earlier with law enforcement operations, a former federal crimes prosecutor, and not not a guy who is a quack by any means, you know, not just some dude on four Chan hosting anonymously.
It's the storm is coming right sorry?
Oh gosh, oh no, quick quick questions, right you?
Oh man?
Uh so, I guess you know. One of the things we have to get to. There's a lot we might not get to tonight. But one of the things we have to get to is what we mentioned in Part one, the p in AC and matt As As we had noted, this was a officially short lived enterprise active ninety seven to two thousand and six. Some people will say some people will say that the public may overestimate the amount of influence the PNAC actually had one thing's for sure. As you said, the number doesn't work. If you go to the building where the P ANDAC was, you will not see it. But the building's far from abandoned.
No, there's other people there. But let's talk about that. When they were up and running, what did you say, ninety seven to two thousand and six, When they were up and running, you could get from their headquarters to the White House Park and be inside like five six minutes. You could walk directly from there in fifteen minutes. It was immediately close to the White House the way a lot of lobby like major lobbyist groups and think tanks are. But just thinking about what that means for access to both people in the White House and you know people in.
Congress shout out to K Street by the way. You remember that TV series It got canceled by congressional request. It's a satire about the lobbying industry.
It's really good.
It's a little too close to you know. I was trying to that. Uh was that Louisiana.
Guy that I was getting some vibes.
No, he's a guy who was working with Clinton a whole bunch. No it's not. He's a major political guy.
Can't think of the former marine guy shaved head. Yes, yeah, oh, oh gosh, Jimmy jim something.
Uh. Carville, James Carville, James.
Carville put some respect on his name.
Yeah, he's he's a he's uh, he is uh.
He actually has a really charming on air presence.
I think so too. But the guy, he knows how to play the dirty games man, and he.
Did he should did. I mean, it is a dirty game, you know what I mean?
You can't be an Olympic swimmer and expect not to get wet to butcher. A weird analogy, but I we'll keep it. But so, okay, Matt, you found something really interesting that I think. I think more people should know what is in this building and what's the building itself?
Oh shoot, I can't remember this part. Ben I I talked with you about this, and I haven't thought about it since then.
Seventeenth Street, right, ye, sure it was uh And you had you had this, You had this great list you found of multiple other organizations.
Oh nuts, Okay, I think I've got it here. Oh, I remember the Order of Malta is there, which is something we've talked about in the past.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, super exclusive passports. Those guys, I want one so bad.
Oh yeah, exactly. Speaking of speaking of lobbying and stuff, the there's what is it called the United United steel Workers. They they are it's their Legislative and Policy department, So you know, that's a huge guild basically there that they're going to go on lobby and they're just five minutes from the White House. What else, Oh, the National Council on US Arab Relations the ncusa ar dot org is that's their website. I thought that's an interesting thing to have there in the same building, right that once housed this place. That was like, we are going to attack a rock in any other country that tries to, you know, buck at the United States. And there's something else, oh s K and a structural Engineers, which probably has nothing to do with any of this, but it made me think about nine to eleven. What is it engineers? Something in Engineers for truth?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Well also, I mean that one I didn't recognize. I'm going to be fully trained parent here. As soon as I saw the Order of Malta, like some kind of ineo morricone, action music started playing in my head and I was like to the internet. You know, you'll see what these connections are. And perhaps that's one of the you know, the dangers or example of the danger that you described here, which is the way leading on to way. If this is true, then what does it mean? How does it connect to these other things? I think Washing DC is just so cool man that doesn't really have a place to this conversation. But it's also a tremendously expensive place to live. Like each of those buildings, or each of those organizations in those buildings, can you imagine what they're paying on their lease, on their rent. Where does the money come from? Where does the money go? Why is this suddenly a cotton eye Joe reference. I don't understand it.
Dude, I don't know. I'm going back. I'm going back to Robert Kagan, one of the founders of the PNEC we talked about in the first episode. Is something he wrote in the Washington Post. Again, this is back in February two thousand. The title is the biggest issue of all. This is during the election two thousand election, right, He says, this is just so interesting to me. Voters are defying truisms about the political salience of foreign policy. Just as they are ignoring truisms about taxes even with no Soviet Union to worry about. They want to know how a candidate would fare as commander in chief, which is a really interesting idea to me, even if there is no big bad guy, ideological bad guy out there. Voters when electing a president want to know how that person is going to fare when they have to put on, you know, take the gloves off, and go to war. Basically, how is this person going to protect me? Which feels like we're in that kind of same spot right now, when the world feels to be preparing for some big calamity right that's going to be imposed with weapons that we've designed and built by weapons manufacturers that percentages of GDP have helped support.
I do.
It does make me weird it out that we're heading into this time again. We're in this country. We have to choose who's up again, you know, right.
Also, also you should point out that there is validity to American forced projection, which not everybody likes to hear, but the US protects global shipping routes. The global shipping economy works because the US Navy and Air Force enforce it.
And I don't know.
I think at at this point, you know, what we clearly see is people who felt they were on the right side of history, felt that they were making the hard decisions. And indeed, by the time two thousand and one rolls around, the Kagans of the world feel that they have been shouting the same message, the same warning sign or the same you know warning for years and years, and they maybe don't necessarily want to be right, but they feel that they are realistically dealing with threats in kind of a I hate to say it, man, but again a greater good argument, the idea being that you have to you have to factor in some ugly things, some attrition, in order to successfully complete the larger aim. And their argument again is their argument is a powerful America makes for a safer America, and a safer America makes for a safer world. Now is that true history has yet to History has yet to bear out completely on this, And I hate that I agree with you on the global vibe. You know, certain situations are untenable, non sustainable, and in a very real way, billions of people seem to be kind of expecting a shoe to drop at some point.
Yeah, but who who. I guess the thing I wonder about is who is representing this group now? So all the individuals we mentioned who were a big part of the project for New American Century, they aren't as much in the spotlight these days. I mean could There's an Al Jazeer article you can read right now. It's titled Decades after nine to eleven, What became of the US's neo Conservatives. It was written by Chris Moody in September of twenty twenty. One can find that right now, and it goes over a few of the different leaders and where they are and what's going on in their lives. But really, like, who represents that these days? I do not know? And what does that group of people want to do?
Well?
How do they see a way out of situations where it feels like a bunch more aggression? Maybe isn't the right way to go right right?
Hammers are good solutions when the problem is nails, But what happens when the problem changes? You might need new tools. I'll tell you here's what it sounds like, Matt. It sounds like what we can say for sure is that a powerful group of people banded together to push by hook or by Crook for us intercession and escalation in a rock as part of a step in a larger plant. We can't say that we have to stay away from assigning like comic book level supervillainy to real people who did it. Seems leverage an opportunity. I have one of my one of my favorite pieces of research for this comes comes directly from you, my friend, and I have a question.
Okay, uh, you should You should go on conversations with Bill Crystal and ask it. Oh.
I think this is one that that you, you and I could can slice up here.
What are we getting at the Oxford Cafe when we go?
Oh dude, it's wrou Oh my gosh, yes, oh man. If you're listening to this, I'm going there for sure, and I'm gonna be I'm gonna just gonna be observing, and Ben is just gonna be watching from the other side of the cafe. It's gonna be awesome.
Let's only speak a code words.
We're gonna put Noel. He's gonna be a barista for the day and he's just gonna watch what everybody orders.
I mean, a pastrue me sandwich for six forty nine.
That's not too bad.
You know, wait, are you serious?
Yeah?
Great, I know, right, So shout out to Oxford Cafe and thank you for finding that, Matt. One of the things you mentioned was like, can you imagine you said, how many people from these various organizations just like drop by there for their breakfast burrito? Yeah, they're six fifty pistramip, just.
Grab a coffee, man, that's so weird. That's why Washington really does freak me out. And it's not it's not for the elected officials that you might see. It's for the people that you cannot recognize, you've never seen them before in your life, but they wheeled in some small, soft way more power than anyone in Conquerens.
Absolutely absolutely agreed. You know, real power is silent pretty often, right, And with this, you know, we we've posed a lot of questions. We knew this could go in a thousand different directions, and it's a conversation that continues, and it's a conversation that we would love to have our fellow conspiracy realists join. Please let us know, you know, let us know about everything we've discussed, especially if you have first hand experience. We'd love to hear from you. And if you have been to the Oxford Cafe. Sorry, I'm getting the angry hungers all right now. If you have been to the Oxford Cafe, tell us about the PASTRAMI super interested in that particular, amongst other things. Thank you so much, folks for tuning in. We we have already Matt. I think we've set up several episodes in the future. We want you to be a part of those.
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